Peru

We arrived in Copacabana early evening, then had to spend quite a while searching for a hostel as most places were taken over by nationals ready to celebrate their national holiday. The town was completely packed out, stalls selling food drink and souveniers everywhere. It was quite a good night but the music went on till the early hours of the morning so we didn{t get much sleep. The next day we spent the morning looking at the town in daylight before getting a bus across to Peru that afternoon. We arrived in Puno at about 4pm and literally had just enough time to dump our stuff in a hostel before we were hearded straight out onto a tour of the floating islands on lake Titicaca. The floating islands were pretty amazing but very cold, they are made intirely from reeds and there were about 60 floating about. Their houses, beds, tables, boats, everything was made from the reeds and they let us look around. Their way of making money was to sell handicrafts to the tourists and when we arrived they were so happy to see us, all waving and smiling. We had booked the tour and hostel on the bus on the way there, we got quite a good deal on both of those but also booked a bus to take us to Arequipa the next morning, that was not quite such a good deal! The man said the bus left at 8 30 so we got a taxi to the bus station at 8 only to find that not only had we paid pretty much double for our tickets, but the bus had left at 8 and they wouldn{t put us on the next bus. Drew was feeling pretty ill at this point and I was left trying to explain to the tourist police (who were on our side) what had happened, he eventually got us a deal which meant we only had to pay one more fair rather than two but it was still an expensive journey! We arrived in Arequipa eary evening and looked around the city, its really beautiful with lovely colonial buildings, our hostel has a rooftop seating area which looks out over the whole city and the mountains, one of which Drew is currently climbing. I decided to stay in the city for the extra two days instead as there is alot to see and its really warm here which makes a change. Today i visited a monestry dating back to the early 1500s, its massive and they call it a city inside a city, it took me two hours to walk round the whole thing. It has little cobbled streets and bright flowers everywhere. Drew gets back tomorrow and i think we are going to get a bus to Cuzco tomorrow night.